‘You can sleep on the couch,’ I said to Bill, getting to my feet. ‘The bathroom’—I pointed off along the corridor—‘is down there somewhere.’
He bobbed his head, but as he kept his eyes on the floor, I could not tell if it had been a response or simply a random movement.
‘Did you hear me?’ I asked.
‘I gotta do somethin’,’ he said.
‘Down there.’ I pointed again. ‘The bathroom.’
‘They gonna kill me ’less I do somethin’.’
He was not, I realized, referring to his bodily functions.
‘What do you mean?’
His eyes flicked up to me, then away. ‘’Less I do somethin’ good, really good, they gonna kill me.’
‘Who’s going to kill you?’
‘The men,’ he said.
The men, I thought, sweet Jesus! I felt unutterably sad for him.
‘I gotta find somethin’,’ he said with increased emphasis. ‘Somethin’ good, somethin’ makes ’em like me.’
I had it now—he had seized on the notion that by some good deed or valuable service he could change people’s opinion of him.
‘You can’t do anything, Bill. You just have to keep doing your job, and this will all wash away, I promise you.’
‘Mmn-mn.’ He shook his head vehemently like a child in denial. ‘I gotta find somethin’ good to do.’
‘Look,’ I said. ‘Anything you try is very likely to backfire. Do you understand me? If you do something and you bugger it, people are going to be more angry at you than ever.’
He tucked his lower lip beneath the upper and narrowed his eyes and maintained a stubborn silence.
‘What does Mister C say about this?’ I asked.
That was, apparently, a new thought. He blinked; the tightness left his face. ‘I don’t know.’
‘Well, ask him. That’s what he’s there for…to help you with your problems.’
‘He doesn’t always help. Sometimes he doesn’t know stuff.’
‘Try, will you? Just give it a try.’
He did not seem sure of this tactic, but after a moment he pawed at his head, running his palm along the crewcut stubble, then squeezed his eyes shut and began to mumble, long, pattering phrases interrupted by pauses for breath, like a child saying his prayers as fast as he can. I guessed that he was outlining the entire situation for Mister C. After a minute his face went blank, the tip of his tongue pushed out between his lips, and I imagined the cartoonish voice—thus I had been told the implant’s voice would manifest—speaking to him in rhymes, in silly patter. Then, after another few seconds, his eyes snapped open and he beamed at me.
‘Mister C says good deeds are always good,’ he announced proudly, obviously satisfied that he had been proven right, and popped another piece of candy into his mouth.
I cursed the simplicity of the implant’s programming, sat back down, and for the next half-hour or so I attempted to persuade Bill that his best course lay in doing absolutely nothing, in keeping a low profile. If he did, I told him, eventually the dust would settle and things would return to normal. He nodded and said, yes, yes, uh-huh, yet I could not be certain that my words were having an effect. I knew how resistant he could be to logic, and it was quite possible that he was only humouring me. But as I stood to take my leave of him, he did something that went some way toward convincing me that I had made an impression: he reached out and caught my hand, held it for a second, only a second, but one during which I thought I felt the sorry hits of his life, the dim vibrations of all those sour, loveless nights and lonely ejaculations. When he released my hand he turned away, appearing to be embarrassed. I was embarrassed myself. Embarrassed and, I must admit, a bit repelled at having this ungainly lump display affection toward me. Yet I was also moved, and trapped between those two poles of feeling, I hovered above him, not sure what to do or say. There was, however, no need for me to deliberate the matter. Before I could summon speech he began mumbling once again, lost in a chat with Mister C.
‘Good night, Bill,’ I said.
He gave no response, as still as a Buddha on his cushion.
I stood beside him for a while, less observing him than cataloguing my emotions, then, puzzling more than a little over their complexity, I left him to his candy and his terror and his inner voices.
Apology was not so prickly a chore as I had feared. Arlie knew as well as I the demons that possessed us, and once I had submitted to a token humiliation, she relented and we made love. She was demanding in the act, wild and noisy, her teeth marked my shoulder, my neck; but as we lay together afterward in the dark, some trivial, gentle music trickling in from the speakers above us, she was tender and calm and seemed genuinely interested in the concerns of my day.
‘God ’elp us!’ she said. ‘You don’t actually fink the Magnificence is at work ’ere, do you?’
‘Christ, no!’ I said. ‘Some miserable dwight’s actin’ on mad impulse, that’s all. Probably done it ’cause his nanny wiped his bum too hard when he’s a babe.’
‘Oi ’ope not,’ she said. ‘Oi’ve seen their work back ’ome too many toimes to ever want to see it again.’
‘You never told me you’d had dealings with the Magnificence.’
‘Oi never ’ad what you’d call dealin’s with ’em, but they was all over our piece of ’eaven, they were. ’Alf the bloody houses sported some kind of daft mark. It was a bleedin’ fertile field for ’em, with nobody ’avin’ a job and the lads just ’angin’ about on the corners and smokin’ gannie. ’Twas a rare day the Bills didn’t come ’round to scrape up some yobbo wearing his guts for a necktie and the mark of his crime carved into his fore’ead. Nights you’d hear ’em chantin’ down by the stadium. ’Orrid stuff they was singin’. Wearin’ that cheap black satin gear and those awrful masks. But it ’ad its appeal. All the senile old ’ooligans were diggin’ out their jackboots and razors, and wantin’ to go marchin’ again. And in the pubs the soaks would be sayin’, yes, they do the odd bad thing, the Magnificence, but they’ve got the public good to ’eart. The odd bad thing! Jesus! Oi’ve seen messages written on the pavement in ’uman bones. Coloured girls with their ’ips broken and their legs lashed back behind their necks. Still breathin’ and starin’ at you with them ’ollow eyes, loike they were mad to die. You were lucky, John, to be living up in Chelsea.’
‘Lucky enough, I suppose,’ I said stiffly, leery of drawing such distinctions; the old British class wars, though somewhat muted on Solitaire, were far from dormant, and even between lovers, class could be a dicey subject. ‘Chelsea’s not exactly the Elysian Fields.’
‘Oi don’t mean nuffin’ by it, luv. You don’t have to tell me the ’ole damn world’s gone rotten long ago. Oi remember how just a black scrap of a life looked loike a brilliant career when Oi was livin’ there. Now Oi don’t know how Oi stood it.’
I pulled her close against me and we lay without speaking for a long while. Finally Arlie said, ‘You know, it’s ’alf nice ’avin’ ’im ’ere.’
‘Bill, you mean?’
‘Yeah, Bill.’
‘I hope you’ll still feel that way if he can’t find the loo,’ I said.
Arlie giggled. ‘Nao, I’m serious. It’s loike ’avin’ family again. The feel of somebody snorin’ away in the next room. That’s the thing we miss ’avin’ here. We’re all so bloody isolated. Two’s a crowd and all that. We’re missin’ the warmth.’
‘I suppose you’re right.’
I touched her breasts, smoothed my hand along the swell of her hip, and soon we were involved again, more gently than before, more giving to the other, as if what Arlie had said about family had created a resonance in our bodies. Afterward I was so fatigued, the darkness seemed to be slowly circulating around us, pricked by tiny bursts of actinic light, the way a djinn must circulate within its prison bottle, a murky cloud of genius and magic. I was at peace lying there, yet I felt strangely excited to be so peaceful and my thoughts, too, were strang
e, soft, almost formless, the kind of thoughts I recalled having had as a child when it had not yet dawned on me that all my dreams would eventually be hammered flat and cut into steely dies so they could withstand the dreadful pressures of a dreamless world.
Arlie snuggled closer to me, her hand sought mine, clasped it tightly. ‘Ah, Johnny,’ she said. ‘Toimes loike this, Oi fink Oi was born to forget it all.’
The next day I was able to track down the villain who had painted the menacing symbol on Bill’s door. The cameras in the corridor outside his door had malfunctioned, permitting the act of vandalism to go unobserved; but this was hardly surprising—the damned things were always failing, and should they not fail on their own, it was no great feat to knock them out by using an electromagnet. Lacking a video record, I focused my attention on the personnel files. Only nine people on Solitaire proved to have had even minimal ties with the Strange Magnificence; by process of elimination I was able to reduce the number of possible culprits to three. The first of them I interviewed, Roger Thirwell, a pale, rabbity polymath in his mid-twenties who had emigrated from Manchester just the year before, admitted his guilt before I had scarcely begun his interrogation.
‘I was only tryin’ to do the wise and righteous,’ he said, squaring his shoulders and puffing out his meagre chest. ‘Samuelson’s been tellin’ us we shouldn’t sit back and allow things to just happen. We should let our voices be heard. Solitaire’s our home. We should be the ones who decide how it’s run.’
‘And so, naturally,’ I said, ‘when it came time to let your majestic voice resound, the most compelling topic you could find upon which to make a statement was the fate of a halfwit.’
‘It’s not that simple and you know it. His case speaks to a larger issue. Samuelson says…’
‘Fuck you,’ I said. ‘And fuck Samuelson.’ I was sick of him, sick of his Midlands accent, sick especially of his references to Samuelson. What possible service, I wondered, could a dwight such as he have provided for the Magnificence? Something to do with logistics, probably. Anticipating police strategies or solving computer defences. Yet from what I knew of the Magnificence, it was hard to imagine them putting up with this nit for very long. They would find a hard use for him and then let him fall off the edge of the world.
‘Why in hell’s name did you paint that thing on his door?’ I asked. ‘And don’t tell me Samuelson ordered you to do it.’
The light of hope came into his face, and I would have sworn he was about to create some fantasy concerning Samuelson and himself in order to shift the guilt to broader shoulders. But all he said was, ‘I wanted to scare him.’
‘You could have achieved that with a bloody stick figure,’ I said.
‘Yeah, but no one else would have understood it. Samuelson says we ought to try to influence as many people as possible whenever we state our cause, no matter how limited our aims. That way we enlist others in our dialogue.’
I was starting to have some idea of what Samuelson’s agenda might be, but I did not believe Thirwell could further enlighten me on the subject. ‘All you’ve succeeded in doing,’ I told him, ‘is to frighten other people. Or is it your opinion that there are those here who would welcome a chapter of the Magnificence?’
He ducked his eyes and made no reply.
‘If you’re homesick for them, I can easily arrange for you to take a trip back to Manchester,’ I said.
This elicited from Thirwell a babble of pleas and promises. I saw that I would get no more out of him, and I cautioned him that if he were ever to trouble Bill again I would not hesitate to make good on my threat. I then sent him on his way and headed off to pay a call on Menckyn Samuelson.
Samuelson’s apartment, like those belonging to most corporate regals, was situated in a large module adjoining the even larger module that housed the station’s propulsion controls, and was furnished with antiques and pictures that would have fetched a dear price back on Earth, but here were absolutely priceless, less evidence of wealth than emblems of faith…the faith we were all taught to embrace, that one day life would be as once it had been, a vista of endless potential and possibility. The problem with Samuelson’s digs, however, was that his taste was abysmally bad; he had assembled a motley collection of items, Guilford chests and blond Finnish chairs, a Jefferson corner cabinet and freeform video sculptures, Victorian sideboard and fibre-optic chandelier, that altogether created the impression one had stumbled into a pawn shop catering to millionaires. It may be that my amusement at this appalling display showed in my face, for though he presented a smile and an outstretched hand, I sensed a certain stiffness in his manner. Nevertheless the politician in him brought him through that awkward moment. Soon he was nattering away, pouring me a glass of whisky, ushering me to an easy chair, plopping himself down into another, giving out with an expansive sigh, and saying, ‘I’m so awfully glad you’ve come, John. I’ve been meaning to have you in for a cup of reminiscence, you know. Two old Londoners like ourselves, we can probably find a few choice topics to bang around.’
He lifted his chin, beaming blandly, eyes half-lidded, as if expecting something pleasant to be dashed into his face. It was such a thespian pose, such a clichéd take on upper-class manners, so redolent of someone trying to put on airs, I had to restrain a laugh. Everything about him struck me as being just the slightest bit off. He was a lean, middle-aged man, dressed in a loose cotton shirt and moleskin trousers, alert in manner, almost handsome, but the nose was a tad sharp, the eyes set a fraction too close together, the cheekbones not sufficiently prominent, the chin a touch insubstantial, too much forehead and not enough hair. He had the essential features of good breeding, yet none of the charming detail, like the runt of a pedigree litter.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘we must do that sometime. However, today I’ve come on station business.’
‘I see.’ He leaned back, crossed his legs, cradled his whisky in his lap. ‘Then p’rhaps after we’ve concluded your business, there’ll be time for a chat, eh?’
‘Perhaps.’ I had a swallow of whisky, savoured the smoky flavour. ‘I’d like to talk with you about William Stamey.’
‘Ah, yes. Old Barnacle Bill.’ Samuelson’s brow was creased by a single furrow, the sort of line a cartoonist would use to indicate a gently rolling sea. ‘A bothersome matter.’
‘It might be considerably less bothersome if you left it alone.’
Not a crack in the veneer. He smiled, shook his head. ‘I should dearly love to, old fellow. But I’m afraid you’ve rather a short-sighted view of the situation. The question we must settle is not the question of Bill per se, but of general policy. We must develop clear guide…’
‘Come on! Give it up!’ I said. ‘I’m not one of your damned pint and kidney pies boy who get all narky and start to drool at the thought of their rights being abused. Their rights! Jesus Christ! The poor scuts have been buggered more times than a Sydney whore, and they still think it feels good. You wouldn’t waste a second on this if it were merely a question of policy. I want to know what you’re really after.’
‘Oh my God,’ Samuelson said, bemused. ‘You’re not going to be an easy lay, are you?’
‘Not for you, darling. I’m saving myself for the one I love.’
‘And just who is that, I wonder.’ He swirled the whisky in his glass, watched it settle. ‘What do you think I’m after?’
‘Power. What else is it makes your toby stiffen?’
He made a dry noise. ‘A simplistic answer. Not inaccurate, I’ll admit. But simplistic all the same.’
‘I’m here for an education,’ I told him, ‘not to give a lecture.’
‘And I may enlighten you,’ Samuelson said. ‘I very well may. But let me ask you something first. What’s your interest in all this?’
‘I’m looking after Bill’s interests.’
He arched his eyebrow. ‘Surely there’s more to it than that.’
‘That’s the sum of it. Aside from the odd deep-seated psychologica
l motive, of course.’
‘Of course.’ His smile could have sliced an onion; when it vanished, his cheeks hollowed. ‘I should imagine there’s an element of noblesse oblige involved.’
‘Call it what you like. The fact remains, I’m on the case.’
‘For now,’ he said. ‘These things have a way of changing.’
‘Is that a threat? Don’t waste your time. I’m the oldest slut on the station, Samuelson. I know where all the big balls have been dragging, and I’ve made certain I’m protected. Should anything happen to me or mine, it’s your superiors who’re going to start squealing. They’ll be most perturbed with you.’
‘You’ve nothing on me.’ This said with, I thought, forced confidence.
‘True enough,’ I said. ‘But I’m working on it, don’t you worry.’
Samuelson drained his glass, got to his feet, went to the sideboard and poured himself a fresh whisky. He held up the bottle, gave me an enquiring look.
‘Why not?’ I let him fill my glass, which I then lifted in a toast. ‘To England. May the seas wash over her and make her clean.’
He gave an amused snort. ‘England,’ he said, and drank. He sat back down, adjusted his bottom. ‘You’re an amazing fellow, John. I’ve been told as much, but now, having had some firsthand experience, I believe my informants may have underestimated you.’ He pinched the crease of one trouserleg. ‘Let me put something to you. Not as a threat, but as an item for discussion. You do understand, don’t you, that the sort of protection you’ve developed is not proof against every circumstance?’
‘Absolutely. In the end it all comes down to a question of who’s got the biggest guns and the will to use them. Naturally I’m prepared along those lines.’
‘I don’t doubt it. But you’re not seeking a war, are you?’
I knocked back half my whisky, rested the glass on my lap. ‘Look here, I’m quite willing to live as one with you, no matter. Until lately, you’ve done nothing to interfere with my agenda. But this dust-up over Bill, and now this bit with your man Thirwell and his paint gun, I won’t have it. Too many people here, Brits and Yanks alike, have a tendency to soil their nappy when they catch a scent of the Magnificence. I’ve no quarrel with you making a power play. And that’s what you’re doing, old boy. You’re stirring up the groundlings, throwing a few scraps to the hounds so they’ll be eager for the sound of your voice. You’re after taking over the administrative end of things, and you’ve decided to give climbing the ladder of success a pass in favour of scaling the castle walls. A bloodless coup, perhaps. Or maybe a spot of blood thrown in to slake the fiercest appetites. Well, that’s fine. I don’t give a fuck who’s sitting in the big chair, and I don’t much care how they get there, so long as we maintain the status quo. But one thing I won’t have is you frightening people.’
Barnacle Bill The Spacer and Other Stories Page 3